DJ Diamond, “Flight Muzik”

Continuing its quest to bring juke/footwork music to the masses, Planet Mu releases this excellent full-length from DJ Diamond, who previously appeared on last year’s Bangs & Works Vol. 1 compilation. While the average footwork track is still around the 2-3 minute mark, this album opens up with a remix of “Rep Yo Clique” (which appears later in the album), stretching it over 5 minutes and chopping its vocal sample into a rapid phasing pattern. While the tracks on this album stay around 160 BPM, and there is plenty of rapid beat shuffling, it seems a bit more smoothed out and less frenetic than other music of this genre. Not quite as lo-fi, and a bit more refined. There’s a lot less obvious sample thievery, apart from the Santigold sample that you would expect in the track “Go Hard”. Still, there’s plenty to wrap your head around here; tracks like “Horns” and “Digimon” and “Burn Dat Boy” have as much pounding bass and inventive, intricate beat structures as anything else we’ve heard so far.